After a few interactions with my colleagues Vikki Hill and Liz Bunting they have asked me a few questions about embedding values of compassion and belonging in our online teaching platforms. One of the questions I’ve found quite difficult to answer as I’d not really thought about it before is: How can Teaching & Learning platforms be compassionate to educators and/ or promote staff sense of belonging?
Here is my attempt at an answer – it’s really just my initial thoughts but I have to start somewhere, so here goes. Firstly, I might be wrong but I don’t think this question is generally thought about either by the designers of the learning platforms or the educational institutions that they operate in. ‘By and large’, these platforms are designed for the student experience or simply just from the perspective of their user interface i.e how easy or intuitive are they able to be used by staff.
Compassion of the educator within universities is seen an individual tutors problem, whilst there are some support systems in place it’s up to the individual tutors to sort out. Just looking at the learning platforms on their own is not the solution – there need to be holistic approach that takes into account the whole workload of the educators (indeed this is in part what the current UCU dispute is all about).
Once these points have been said there are some characteristics that learning platforms could start to address when it comes to issues of compassion and belonging. The diagram below starts with what I would consider the essentials:
Time: I think this point is broadly applicable to both staff and students. One of the biggest issues for tutors is the amount of work and multiple tasks they have to conduct in their working week and it is a major source of stress and fatigue amongst teaching staff. Little account is made of this in teaching tools that we use – indeed it is often the digital tool that are often causing the extra workload. I’ve never seen it in a teaching platform but maybe what is needed is some indication of the amount of contact time these learning activities actually take. Time spent on an activities, assessment (Grading, feedback), synchronous/asynchronous contact are all difficult to quantify but maybe there could be some indication and recognition of what the tutors are doing. Surely given the learning analytics embedded in these platforms we could move away from measuring student activity and ‘engagement’ to offering support and guidance to the tutor?
Co-Creation: Many of the learning platforms we have are just reproductions of the traditional lecture style system of university education. Digital system do exist for all sorts of alternative such as, peer/self-review, group work, collaboration but often they are still in their infancy and remain clunky and too complicated to use. I’m sure this will change in time but at the moment development and money has been spent on undermining trust and authority of both the tutors and the students. Plagiarism detection software is a good example of this (basically I’m talking about Turnitin here) students are taught how to avoid high similarity scores and tutors are effectively deskilled as they write assignment tasks that can be submitted in these systems.
Another point is related to co-creation is ‘Humanising the tech’ – maybe this is a separate point? All the systems we use just feel so impersonal and corporate, sometimes for good reasons but they just seem to strip out our humanity away. We need universal systems across the university for accessibility and compatibility reasons but they leave little scope for the person in what is essentially a very human process – teaching. One alternative is to use less than perfect do-it-yourself ‘edupunk’ systems, like recording a selfie video on a phone and sharing with students, however this approach doesn’t really scale up in the big corporate world of HE.
Accessibility: There have been massive improvements in online accessibility on the last few years and a lot of this has gone completely under the radar for most senior managers in HE. Things like Universal Design for Learning (UDL) or the improvements is speech recognition software have transformed some students learning experience. This might be a controversial point but again these amazing advances have come at a cost – they do involve more work for the tutors. Just take the automatic caption software used in systems like Panopto or YouTube – they do a great job but still require that they are checked by a human (most often the tutor) to make sure they are 100% accurate. The tech is catching up to some extent, Blackboard’s monopoly use of Ally means that we can check to see what is wrong but we are along from having a system that can correct our mistakes and omissions and reduce the tutors workload.
Flexibility: One good thing that may have come out of the sudden shift to online teaching during the Pandemic was that we had to do things in different ways. Assessment is a good example of this – suddenly the exam, or the essay or the Crit couldn’t be done in the same old way and alternatives were developed – whether we go back to the old is another question. Some VLE’s or parts of the VLE could cope with this flexibility, some couldn’t. Allowing and enabling tutors to do things in many different ways in these platforms is another factor in the compassion/belonging mix…
Ok that’s it for now…will come back to this at a later date..its still a work in progress!